Ruminations
| Publication year | 2015 |
| Pages | 10 |
When Inquests Were Inquisitions
Paul S. Gillies, Esq.
When death comes unexpectedly, when there is uncertainty about what happened, offcials must inquire. An inquest is the first stage in the criminal justice process that may lead to a grand jury, charges, and a trial. It was a part of legal procedure in this state from before there was a Vermont, based on the English model. Its purpose is not to accuse or charge. It is purely investigatory. But until the 1850s, the result of the inquest was not kept secret, and the conclusion that someone was responsible for a death became public knowledge even when no subsequent proceedings followed.
An inquest differs from a grand jury. A grand jury is empowered to indict, by the fending of a true bill. An inquest answers or tries to answer how a person died. Today, the proceedings of both are treated as secret. The doors on the room where the hearing is conducted are locked, and everyone, from the jurors to the bailiff, are sworn to maintain the confidentiality of the proceedings. That is one reason studying these institutions is a challenging business. The evidence about how inquests were conducted and how they ruled has leaked into the public domain through official and unofficial sources. Let’s unseal some of it.
Unlike grand juries, today inquests are heard by a single judge, but the court of inquest, or court of inquiry, was a feature of the law from 1779 to 1856. After that date, justices of the peace acted alone, and made decisions that at times led to the next stage of the criminal justice system, the grand jury, and beyond that to a criminal prosecution by the state’s attorney. But during the era of the jury, the process was different. The jury was the body responsible for the decision, not the justice of the peace, who would give no charge or instructions. How this worked procedurally is unclear, but results became public in this period. They were described in a newspaper, and were the subject of public discussion. Even when no charges were fled, people knew that a jury had found someone to be the cause of a death. A very different thing from a conviction, of course, but the censure was manifest in the finding, and served, without more, as a sanction in some cases.
Inquisitions are hearings without the benefit of a defense. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of fifteenth century Spain, used more corporal means to investigate and obtain confessions of heretics, but the process of looking into evidence of criminal acts in an official forum, closed to the public, leaving the accused no role to observe or review the process, seems similarly, if not equally, unfair. It is inconsistent with our modern appreciation for openness and due process, and our respect for the rights of the accused. The result of an inquest today is secret, unless unsealed. There is a statute, and a criminal rule, dealing with process.[1] The inquest results in a written report, and serves as a way of instilling confidence in a state’s attorney or assistant attorney general to decide whether to bring charges against an individual. An inquest makes no fending of guilt of a violation of law. The inquest might find one person killed another, but it cannot decide whether it was murder, even though many of the early reports use that term in their conclusions.
Inquests have other functions in the law. In 1826, there was an inquest of insanity held before a judge of probate.[2] In the administration of the poor laws, two justices of the peace were required to ascertain the residence of a pauper by the statute of 1797.[3] An inquest of office could be held to determine whether a landowner was an alien (and so incapable of owning land until naturalized). All were inquisitions, in one case the report called the proceedings “an inquisition of jurors.”[4]
The First Inquest
The first reported inquest in this land came the day following the Westminster Massacre, in March of 1775, after partisans of the New Hampshire Grants stopped the Cumberland County Court of Common Pleas from opening, and William French was shot by the sheriff’s party as it retook the courthouse at midnight. After two hundred angry settlers arrived the following day, the court and sheriff’s party were confined under strict guard. The settlers met at the courthouse, chose a moderator and clerk, and appointed a committee to observe the proceedings of the coroner’s jury of inquest.[5] William French’s body was laid out in the courtroom, to be viewed by the jury, and many others stopped to dip handkerchiefs in French’s blood. Vermont historians claim this was the first blood shed in the war for independence.[6]
The inquisition into the death of William French was conducted under New York law. There was a duly-appointed coroner and seventeen jurors. The jury found the respondents “made an assault on the Body of the Said Wm French and Shot him Through the Head with a Bullet of which would he Died and Not Other ways.” The coroner joined in the verdict.[7] The jury ordered the expulsion of the accused from the state, and the judges and others were seized and taken to Northampton jail.[8] Samuel Knight, one of those who were named, suffered no more than a few days in jail before he and the others were released. He changed his allegiance, his crime was forgotten, and Knight was subsequently elected chief judge of the Vermont Supreme Court, serving from 1789 to 1793.[9]
In this first instance, the modern function of inquest, grand jury, and petit jury all merged into one efficient and seamless process. The Northampton jailers had no idea what to do with the prisoners, and soon released them to return home.
Speedy Goodrich
In October of 1830, a twenty-three year-old woman died in Burlington. The physicians that attended her concluded her death was caused by a badly-performed abortion. A medical student at the University of Vermont was named as the father and accused of performing the operation that led to her death. Burlington justice of the peace David Russell presided, Nathan Haswell as clerk, and Charles Adams was state’s attorney. The jury consisted of fifteen men, including physicians William Chamberlain, Truman Powell, James Corbin, and Benjamin Lincoln, all determined to be “good and lawful men.” The jury was sworn and “charged to enquire for the State of Vermont, when and how and by what means the said Speedy Goodrich came to her death.” The jury examined witnesses, and reached a verdict. There were no parties and no lawyers, other than the state’s attorney, who led the questioning. The accused had been summoned but not served, and did not appear. The justice of the peace played little part in the proceeding, other than to see the right forms were completed. The state’s attorney asked the questions, and the jury made its decision.
A rich version of the tragedy that linked Charles Daggett and Experience (Speedy) Goodrich was published as a novel by UVM Archivist Jeffrey Marshall in 2006, entitled The Inquest. This is historical fiction, in the tradition of Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first important novelist, whose philosophy of writing in that genre authorized an injection of romance into the known facts of a story, to bring it to life.[10] Where the spare report of the inquest, found by Marshall in the archives but otherwise lost to history in other official documents, gave synopses of the testimony and the decision of the jury, the novel expands the story by first person accounts of three central characters—Daggett, the decedent’s sister, and a stenographer (an invented persona used as a device to describe the inquest itself)— bringing passion and color to the tragedy and its subsequent resolution through the legal system. The material added by Marshall is precisely what is missing from most official accounts of crimes and criminal process, yet it is what has the most importance in decisions of a cause of death, a fending of guilt, or sentencing in the criminal justice system. The tragedies of life are left out of the public record.
“Upon their oaths,” in the matter of the death of Speedy Goodrich, the jury unanimously concluded “that she came to her death from the use of unlawful means to procure an abortion thro’ the instrumentality of Charles D. Daggett, and unreasonable exposure.” Charles D. Daggett was never charged with a crime. There was no prosecution and no trial. The inquest stands alone to mark his and her story.
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